By Michael R. Gordon and Randall C. ArchiboldMAY 22, 2015WASHINGTON — Despite a wave of optimism, United States and Cuban negotiators this week failed to reach an accord on re-establishing diplomatic ties that had been fractured during the Cold War, United States and Cuban officials said on Friday.(NewYorkTimes.com)JG: I am very sure of what I would do if I was President of Cuba:

I would tell Barack Obama: "There will not be re-establishment of diplomatic relations as long as the U.S, Congress continues the Cuba embargo." Plain and simple!

Sunday, May 24, 2015

"The pledge to fund multiple Republicans is consistent with what Charles Koch told USA Today
in April about the candidacies of Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker,
former Florida governor Jeb Bush, Texas Senator Ted Cruz, Kentucky
Senator Rand Paul, and Florida Senator Marco Rubio. He indicated all six
were at the top of the listin terms of who might receive funding."

The polls are likely to herald the end of the dominant two-party system, as small grassroots movements such as the radical Left-wing Podemos benefit from public frustration at corruption and the economic crisis

James Badcock in Madrid

9:41AM BST 24 May 2015

Voters across Spain will cast their ballots on Sunday in local and regional elections seen as a public verdict on political corruption and handling of the country's beleaguered economy, with new grassroots movements expected to make big gains at the expense of the traditional parties of power.

At stake are seats in more than 8,100 town halls and parliament seats in 13 of Spain's 17 regions, and opinion polls suggest that Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy's Popular Party (PP ) will lose its current majorities in most of the 10 regions it controls. The beneficiaries are likely to be the new radical Left party Podemos and another new force in Spanish politics, the business-friendly Ciudadanos (Citizens), which have taken advantage of public frustrations with the status quo to transform the country's political landscape.

Podemos Looks for Upset in Madrid Mayoral Election

5/21/2015 1:14PM

Corruption scandals and high unemployment have battered the approval ratings of Spain's governing Popular Party and polls show voters are defecting to two upstart parties, the leftist Podemos and the center-right Ciudadanos.

Thursday, May 21, 2015

The so-called Patriot act was passed based on the national PARANOIA after 9/11. It must be repealed. The constitutional guarantees of the USA are in great danger since this "act" was imposed on gullible Americans.

JG: They got that one right! Until the U.S. Congress UNCONDITIONALLY lifts the Cuba embargo/blockade, no new embassies should be opened in La Habana or in Washington D.C. The IS (Interests Sections) should continue as usual, until the embargo is lifted. One man's opinion, mine!

Raul Castro should NOT BE too eager to please the Yankees, since Washington is the aggressor and Cuba is the aggrieved and damaged country. Reparations for the failed embargo? The Yankees failed to overthrow the Cuban government, which is what JFK intended.

"Scholars and military experts say it’s difficult to see how United States can overhaul its relationship with Havana while hanging on to a big chunk of Cuban territory indefinitely, especially if relations warm significantly in a post-Castro era.""The U.S. government still dutifully sends rent checks to the Cuban government, but the Castros' don’t cash them. They don’t recognize the lease, and – like landlords in a rent-controlled Brooklyn apartment -- want their tenants to leave. Fidel Castro is said to keep the checks piled up in his desk drawer, using them as a kind of political prop.It’s hard to imagine a more ready-made symbol of U.S. imperialism than a military base whose history is so wrapped up in late 19-century attempts at American empire."

At first glance, Podemos’s dizzying rise looks miraculous. In truth, the project evolved over a long time.

Photograph: David Ramos/Getty

Podemos leader Pablo Iglesias rails against the monsters of ‘financial totalitarianism’,and tells the party’s followers to ‘take their dreams seriously’. Photograph: Dani Pozo/AFP/GettyLink to the Article @ The Guardian

Excerpt:

At the start of the 2008 academic year, Pablo Iglesias, a 29-year-old lecturer with a pierced eyebrow and a ponytail greeted his students at the political sciences faculty of the Complutense University in Madrid by inviting them to stand on their chairs. The idea was to re-enact a scene from the film Dead Poets Society. Iglesias’s message was simple. His students were there to study power, and the powerful can be challenged. This stunt was typical of him. Politics, Iglesias thought, was not just something to be studied. It was something you either did, or let others do to you. As a professor, he was smart, hyperactive and – as a founder of a university organisation called Counter-Power – quick to back student protest. He did not fit the classic profile of a doctrinaire intellectual from Spain’s communist-led left. But he was clear about what was to blame for the world’s ills: the unfettered, globalised capitalism that, in the wake of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, had installed itself as the developed world’s dominant ideology.

As one of the founders of the Mortgage Victims' Platform, Ada Colau has spent the past six years battling the most visible scars of Spain’s economic crisis, from growing inequality to home evictions. Now the 41-year-old activist could become Barcelona’s next mayor.

Polls have put Colau, and the Barcelona en Comú (Barcelona in Common) citizen platform she leads, in the top spot in the runup to Spain’s regional and municipal elections. A grassroots coalition of several political parties, including Podemos, and thousands of citizens and activists, Barcelona en Comú has become the brightest hope for the many in Spain pushing for democratic regeneration.

Abbas and Pope FrancisPhoto: Andrew Medicini / APThe Vatican has officially recognized Palestine in a new treaty that switches the Holy See's diplomatic relations from the Palestine Liberation Organization to the state of Palestine.(www.npr.org)

Wednesday, May 13, 2015

Polls show that most Cuban Americans favor warming ties between the two countries.

Presidential candidate Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) probably thought that his hawkish, Cold War foreign policy would endear him to Cuban Americans—but he may be in for an unwelcome surprise. Cuba policy is close to Rubio's heart—his parents fled the country in 1956—and he has denounced the Obama administration's détente with the Castro regime as "disgraceful" and "willfully ignorant." Historically, this kind of rhetoric has earned Republicans support among Cuban Americans. But polls suggest that things have changed, and that Rubio's strident Cuba outlook could damage his standing among a constituency that has buoyed his political career.

Every year since 1991, Florida International University has surveyed Cuban Americans' attitudes on US-Cuba policy. The most recent poll, taken in 2014, reveals that those who took to Miami's streets in December 2014 to protest the US restoring relations with Cuba are in the minority: 52 percent of poll respondents oppose continuing the embargo, and 68 percent favor the reestablishment of diplomatic relations. More than 70 percent say the embargo has worked poorly. How Cuban Americans of different ages responded reveals a stark generational split: A majority of those aged 65 and older still favor the embargo, but two-thirds of those aged 18 to 29 oppose it. Nearly 90 percent of millennial Cuban Americans favor reestablishing ties too.

For the 43-year-old Rubio, who is trying to brand himself as a new generation of Republican, this could be a problem. According to Guillermo Grenier, a Cuban studies expert at FIU, Rubio's Cuba policy "doesn't have legs" for the future. "People are changing. Rubio's position will resonate among a certain percentage of the population—a shrinking percentage." The younger generation, Grenier says, "say things like, 'How can Rubio be against the embargo—doesn't he know it hurts Cubans on the island?'"

WASHINGTON – In a rare rebuke of a key priority of President Barack Obama's, Democrats in the U.S. Senate today rejected a measure that would have given his administration additional authority to negotiate a wide-reaching trade bill with Pacific Rim nations.

For weeks, opponents of giving the Obama administration the Trade Promotion Authority (TPA) it sought to fast-track the Trans-Pacific Partnership argued that Congress should not surrender the leverage it has to insist on currency, worker and environmental protections being part of the deal.

(Detroit Free Press)

JG: Why is the treaty text not published yet? What is Barack Obama trying to hide?

It appears that Barack Obama is trying to favor his main constituency: huge trans-national capitalist corporations.

A vibrant, multi-hued painting featuring a scantily attired female amid
smaller nudes, could sell for more than $140 million, becoming the most
expensive work of art at auction.

(www.theguardian.com) Update:Monday, May 11, 2015, 8:01 p.m.A Picasso masterpiece has sold for $US 160 million in New York, smashing the world record for most expensive art sold at auction.(www.abc.net.au)

"Round trip tickets run $400 to $500. The Cuban government takes the equivalent of $148.00 per ticket as a landing fee and another $46 per passenger for mandatory health insurance while visiting the island. (The Cuban government separately charges a departure tax to leave.) The U.S. charges another $63 per ticket in its own charges. Much of the charters' profit is in luggage charges. Cuban-American travel laden with goods for their extended families. [JG; while telling the right wingers in the U.S. that they are 100% anti-Communist.] and can pay $2 per pound after a $20 checked bag and $3 per pound for boxes and irregular packages."

******

JG: I just finished a one week vacation in Valencia, Spain, I did not have to pay all of these exorbitant rip-off fees. Travel to Cuba is for suckers.

In addition to the "fees" listed by the magazine, The Cuba Interests Section In Washington D.C. charges $130.00 for a visa to Cubans who left the island in 1961. In addition they charge $40.00 for round-trip express mail.

Imagine! Having to pay for a visa to visit the country where you were born.

Castle of Xàtiva (Valencian: Castell de Xàtiva) is a castle located in the city of Xàtiva near Valencia, Spain. It is strategically located on the ancient roadway Via Augusta leading from Rome across the Pyrenees and down the Mediterranean coast to Cartagena and Cádiz.

In 1092, the castle fell into the occupation of the Almoravid dynasty who were expelled in an uprising that took place in 1145. During this uprising, the castle was besieged by the Governor of Valencia, Marwan Abd-al-Aziz. In 1171, the Castle finally fell, along with the rest of the Levante coast, into the hands of the Almohads.

King James I of Aragon began his crusade there in the summer of 1239, finally capturing Xátiva on 22 May 1244, following a five-month siege. After submitting to the Christian monarch and signing the Treaty of Játiva the Moors handed over the smaller nearby Castle to James I, while they were allowed to continue occupying the larger castle for another two years based on the terms of the treaty.

After the two years had elapsed King James I of Aragon repopulated a large part of the town with Catalan and Aragonese settlers.

The walk up to the castle is a long one, but the views are sensational. On the way up, on your left is the 18th-century Ermita de San José and, to the right, the lovely Romanesque Iglesia de Sant Feliu (1269), Xàtiva’s oldest church. You’ll also pass by the very battered remains of part of the old Muslim town.

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